Activity in brains

Dehaene has an interesting article in Edge.org on his work in studying brain activity related to consciousness experience, or rather brain activity associated with the ability to report on the nature of brief stimuli presented visually. He uses language in an infuriating way typical of neuroscience:

We can see a lot of cortical activation created by a subliminal word. It enters the visual parts of the cortex, and travels through the visual areas of the ventral face of the brain.

Now, If I have a basin of water, and I tap the side, waves propagate through the basin, but my tap is not propagating, and there is an important distinction between the wave pattern and the tap. Yet neuroscientists talk as if stimuli were being passed around in the brain. An important insight of the enactive tradition is to clearly separate between the tap and the waves, or between a perturbation to the dynamics of the organism and the effect of that perturbation.